How to use identifiers with your mobile app

Usually, your contacts will log in to your mobile app via email. 

After you send the profileIdentified event containing the email, Ometria can either create the contact - if seen first on mobile - or match the contact to an existing profile based on their email.

It's good practice to use customer IDs as a primary identifier, rather than emails which can change over a customer's lifetime.

You do need to be more careful when using customer IDs outside the mobile app, e.g. when sending to Ometria's data API or uploading CSV files, as you'll need to make sure the Customer IDs always match.

For example, if a contact is first 'seen' on the mobile app, then the Customer ID you generate should ideally come from your backend systems - or if it's generated in the app itself then it must be synchronised to your backend systems at the earliest opportunity.

If the app generates a customer ID and your backend or your website generates a different one, this can lead to duplicate customer profiles.

If you use both customer ID and email, Ometria will accept both and will give preference to the customer ID when trying to match customer profiles, using email as a fallback. 

If we have seen the contact on mobile first, the profile will be created with the first identifier you sent to Ometria via the profileIdentified event.

Further identifiers can be attached to it by sending a customer record to the Ometria data API.

Enriching profile information

When a customer is first seen on mobile, Ometria creates a profile for them based on the identifier you have sent via the profileIdentified event. 

This profile will be empty, with no personal information and no marketing preferences. You need to send a customer record to the Ometria data API to supply any further profile data, so you can personalise the messages you will send to the customer.